OPINION:THE NOVELIST William Faulkner wrote: "The past is never dead. It's not even past." Not everyone would agree with him. In Brian Friel's Philadelphia, Here I Come!, as the young emigrant is leaving for the USA, his schoolteacher tells him: "It's a vast restless place that doesn't give a curse about the past."
It all depends on where you come from. In the 19th century, the “great powers” – Britain, France, Austria-Hungary and Russia – were outward-looking, dynamic, self-assured, creating empires at the expense of smaller, weaker peoples throughout the world.
These little people were struggling to establish a sense of identity, of what they could achieve if they, too, could constitute a nation, a self-determining autonomy. You can dispense with the past if your sense of moving forward allows it. Otherwise, you cling to it because you don’t have that sense of a future.
Despite those who turn their backs on post-colonial studies, Ireland's dialogue with its past reflects its emergence as a modern state: the sensitive elucidation of the Famine (illustrated in this paper by Brendan Ó Cathaoir's Famine Diary), the rediscovery of the diaspora, the debates over commemoration of 1916, the economic war of the 1930s, the "Emergency", which everyone else called the second World War, the arms trial – all carry the weight of Ireland's relationship with its former political master.
The old idea that history is written by the winners is no longer valid. Ireland’s revisionist historians have proved that. The Murphy report has proved that. You can sweep the unwanted bits of history under the carpet only up to the point at which the carpet itself becomes threadbare and has to be renewed.
Faulkner was right. The past is all we have to go on. As a route map to the future, it projects a country’s experiences in the same way as an abused child carries forward horrendous lesions on its psyche.
If you ask a sample of citizens in Ireland or France or Greece to write down the most salient features of life, it’s odds-on that a sense of the past, triggered by memory, will permeate the list. To ignore or deny the past is to try – impossibly – to erase what has made us what we are. An individual, even a family, may succeed in making a better, more liveable life through denial, but a whole nation . . ?
Abort the idea of what it means to be Irish/French/Greek and you remove the reason for living. That is what the smaller nations have been trying to articulate for 200 years, and what the greater powers have failed to realise up to now. Smaller countries have to try harder, and even France is now conducting an official national debate into the meaning of French identity.
In France's case, the legal tussles over the wearing – or prohibition – of the Islamic veil have introduced massive question marks over what it means to be French. Charles de Gaulle is credited with saying: "How can you govern a country that has 246 different types of cheese?" Yet France has, until now, been relatively sure of its identity as the custodian of its own, and Europe's, culture. Now, Sarkozy is faced with the faceless face of the Muslim woman, suggesting that France is no longer "a nation". Quel fromage.
A nation is shaped primarily by its culture, or, more accurately, its cultures. As Michael D Higgins said recently, culture is “the building block of citizenship”. It creates a society and selects leaders to give it a sense of direction. If it has been dominated for any length of time by a neighbouring power (Ireland by Britain, Norway by Denmark, Finland by both Sweden and Russia, Greece by Turkey, and most of eastern Europe by the Austro-Hungarian empire), then it can’t divest itself of the central place in its culture occupied by the fact of colonisation. Dealing with that experience is what enables a nation to transcend its past, and imagine a better future.
The Belgian state was created at the same time as Greece, in the 1830s, and for the same reasons. Belgium is an invented country, two incompatible elements thrown together just because it suited the big boys to create a buffer zone between the Dutch and the French. To this day, the two communities live in such disharmony that, for over six months in 2007-2008, the fear of partition was very real, and postcolonial thinking – “how did we get here?” – was the order of the day.
Even now, as Belgium is about to assume the presidency of the EU, it is demonstrating that its political divisions are merely the symptoms of its cultural misfit, of the fact that the greater powers tried to manipulate an assimilation that could never work out. It is perhaps appropriate that Belgium should be the home of the greatest disaster in European history – the EU. Belgium is, well, God’s apology for Switzerland.
And in the case of Greece, the EU – desperate to maintain not only the euro zone but its very raison d’etre, its forward thrust as a superpower – is insisting on assimilation, rather than acknowledging that Greece should never have joined the EU. Balkan Greece has as much in common with the western states as Genghis Khan had with the girl-guide movement, and the fact that it is causing almost as much damage as Genghis is not entirely its own fault.
For any country to have a sense of purpose and destiny, it must have a sense of the past that motivates it. It must have a dynamic. Despite its appalling history of suffering at the hands of Britain, and the successive failures of political uprising, Ireland provided that dynamic through a sense of its cultural wealth, especially from the 1880s onwards. Cultural nationalism succeeded where political nationalism had not yet found its feet. A growing sense of “who we are”.
And Ireland could be strong again, through its amazing cultural vigour. I don’t necessarily mean the international achievements of Brian Friel, Séamus Heaney, Louis le Brocquy, Gerald Barry or Dorothy Cross, immeasurable though they are. I mean the perceptions that fuel their creativity: Friel looking at the local as global; Heaney caressing memory as the way forward; le Brocquy’s “other” way of seeing; Barry’s intellectual musical brilliance; and Cross’s radical critique of what “art” can be: art as part of the cultural intelligence of a people. Apart from the past, it may be all we have to go on.
-Richard Pine is Director Emeritus of the Durrell School of Corfu, where he lives